Technical Writing on the Web

April 27, 2019

One of my first major career accomplishments was when, in 2012, a publisher contacted me about co-authoring on a book. They’d found my blog and thought I was good enough at technical writing to help write a book – like an actual paper book! I owe that opportunity to the writing I’d done on my blog and I’ve only continued to hone my craft since then.

One of my colleagues, Ash Furrow, is really the powerhouse behind improving the state of our public documentation. He runs weekly writing workshops internally and always encourages achievements as being post-worthy. Sometimes the best practice is to have someone who cares encouraging you. It works for me.

In this post, I want to discuss both how and why to improve your own technical writing skills. In a follow-up post, I’m going to cover how I’ve become the writing “powerhouse” that Orta describes me as above.

While I’m going to focus specifically on writing, there are many ways that humans communicate technical ideas: diagrams, podcasts, meetup talks, paired programming, etc. A lot of what I discuss applies broadly to knowledge sharing beyond just writing.

I stated earlier that written communication is a “critical skill” for software engineering because writing code is written communication. A lot of programmers think that writing code is how we tell computers what to do, but I disagree. To prove my point, let me quote the introduction of a famous book on programming:

Programs must be written for people to read, and only incidentally for machines to execute.

Think about the implications of this, applied to your own experience. We write code to express ideas, and when others read our code, they’re trying to understand those ideas. Computers don’t care about ideas, they care about executing instructions.

Let me put it this way: if code weren’t written communication, why do coders care so much about formatting and style? Semicolons and whitespace? Tabs and spaces?

Writing code is one way to communicate ideas, but the language of code is rigid and highly structured. Natural language, like English, is ambiguous and messy, and good programmers often have a difficult time expressing themselves using written words. What I’ll say to this is that you don’t need to only use natural language to communicate ideas. In fact, pieces of technical writing (like blog posts and documentation) often need to be punctuated with code snippets and examples.

As you begin technical writing, lean on this. You’re already comfortable expressing ideas in code, so try writing about topics that lend themselves to including lots of code snippets. Some of my earliest blog posts, like this one, are like, half code.

The most important step to improving any skill is practice. If you want to improve your writing skills, then you need to write. But of course, writing alone is not enough, but it is necessary. You need to set up habits and behaviours that put you in a position to write as much as possible: scheduling time to write, weekly or daily, is a great way to start.

(Another really important habit to get into is writing short technical posts as you get exposed to new ideas and questions. I explain in more detail here why it’s important to capitalize on these opportunities.)

Beginning to write is going to suck because you’re not going to be good at writing for a while. That’s okay! You need to get comfortable with sucking at writing because – just like coding – most of what you write isn’t going to be very good. Especially at first. Don’t be afraid to use blog post templates to help you get started – I have some here you can get started with.

As a beginner, you’re going to have to learn to distance yourself from what you write. You need this distance in order to develop critical reading skills. Your writing might suck, sure, but why does it suck? How do you improve it?

To help develop your critical reading skills, you should also be reading a lot. But not just reading anything: read the kinds of posts that you want to write. Read something, and then pause to think about why you like it (or not). You’re trying to develop taste. Once you read something, ask yourself if you like it and then ask yourself why. Is it the tone of the post? Is it the level of detail? Is it the narrow or broad audience it focuses on?

Being a beginner in any creative pursuit sucks because, at first, your taste exceeds your abilities. You know what you’ve written isn’t good but you’ve not yet got the skills to improve it. Lean into that discomfort. Figure out what the delta is between your writing output and your taste, and then practice those skills.

You should also be seeking out feedback on what you write from people you trust. If you have a blog post, send it to a friend or colleague and ask them for feedback. But be specific about what kind of feedback you want. This is where developing your taste starts to pay dividends: tell your reviewer what you’re trying to accomplish as a writer so they can help identify those deltas I mentioned earlier. If you’re really close to the person, you can also tell them how you’re trying to grow as a writer to get even more specific feedback.

Feedback is a gift, so if someone gives you feedback, take it constructively. Learning to accept good-faith feedback as a gift is probably the most important skill you can develop as a professional, regardless of your profession.

Don’t underestimate the value of the web as a writing platform; it presents its own unique set of opportunities that, used effectively, enhances writing beyond the written, printed word.

First up, the web is mutable. If you make a mistake on a blog post, you can edit that post. Once I wrote a blog post that was so bad – just unbelievably factually incorrect – that I deleted the entire contents and replaced the post with a photo of my cat. It’s okay to make mistakes on the web because people will correct you and then you can make edits based on feedback. Hell, I get other people to fix my typos (please click the “Edit” link at the bottom of this post if you find any here).

Next, the web isn’t just a medium, it’s a hypermedium. You don’t just write text, you write hypertext. Compelling online writing, whether its blog posts or documentation, should take appropriate advantage of the capabilities of the web. Let’s take a look at a few examples.

If you’re writing a blog post and there’s some kind of prerequisite your audience needs to know, you can just link to further reading. People familiar with the prerequisite won’t click it, but someone who needs more context can. Judicious use of hyperlinks is one of the most important fundamentals of compelling writing on the web.

If you’re writing a blog post and there’s some multimedia that can support your point – a podcast, a video, an Instagram post – then you can just embed it instead of linking to it. This is critical because it helps break up the visuals of your writing. I’ve included a video and block quotes in this post to introduce visual interest; I avoid writing walls of text.

Finally, if you’re writing a blog post and an idea is too difficult to convey using language, you can make it interactive. Language is really lossy at conveying some ideas, while animated/interactive components in online writing can convey them fluently. Let’s take my recent post on JavaScript and iOS; it used a mock conversation UI to force the reader into having the conversation that I wanted to have with them. Or take Orta’s post on augmented reality at Artsy; it used SVG diagrams that were dynamically styled with JavaScript and CSS. My post detailing the first 5 years of my career isn’t even really a blog post – it’s a scroll-driven animated timeline of my life.

Text couldn’t have expressed those same ideas as losslessly as the interactive elements.

Earlier, I said that online writing should take appropriate advantage of what the web has to offer; you need to decide what you’re trying to accomplish with your writing, and then use the aspects of the web that support your goals. Namely, don’t make things interactive for the fun of it – make them interactive to convey nuance, or persuade someone, or tell a story. And don’t get lost in making your writing web-centric that you neglect developing fundamentals of written language: diction, punctuation, tone, and metaphor.

Interactive elements ought to support your writing, not distract from it.

The web is its own medium; get familiar with it and learn to leverage it. For an in-depth exploration of what electronic writing can be, read this post by Bret Victor.

As you write more and more, you’ll eventually find that your time writing gets spent in two distinct “modes”: inserting new content, and editing existing content. (Tell me if this sounds familiar, vim users.) I usually spend about two thirds of my writing time by dumping out a stream-of-consciousness blob of text, and spend the rest of my writing time editing. Editing is whittling down, rearranging, rephrasing, etc. Usually these two modes are done in separate sessions of work, to give myself emotional distance from what I’ve written.

Sometimes, I’ll finish writing my initial stream-of-consciousness and when I go back to edit it, I realize that a huge part just needs to be deleted. Usually it’s the first third. That’s okay – the separation I develop between me and my writing helps me know when something I’ve written is bound for the trash.

Earlier, I mentioned developing a narrative voice. This too is something that comes with practice – but what even is a narrative voice? It’s the rhythm of your sentences, the cadence of your paragraphs. It’s the tone you take, conveyed through diction and punctuation. It’s how your post feels to read. This is one of the things I often explain to first-time contributors to the Artsy Engineering blog: instead of trying to adhere to an official “Artsy Engineering Editorial Voice”, they should use the blog as an opportunity to develop their own.

Okay! You might have noticed that so far, I haven’t really described where to put your writing. I generally don’t like telling people where to put their writing, but here’s my take:

It literally doesn’t matter where you blog.

Especially at first because – sorry to say this – but no one is really going to read what you write. You’re not really writing for others as much as you are writing for yourself. That’s okay, that’s normal, just accept it. In the beginning, the process of writing is more important than the actual content you write.

Lots of programmers, when trying to write more, tend to procrastinate by building/configuring their blog. Instead of spending time writing, they’ll faff with CSS or Gatsby or Squarespace templates. This is a trap. Resist this temptation.

If you’re just beginning and need somewhere to put a blog post, put them on GitHub Gists. Gists are publicly accessible, indexable by Google, and let you write in Markdown. And most importantly: you cannot faff with design on a gist.

Once you’ve practiced enough writing to warrant investing in an actual blog, you can go ahead and find a more permanent home for your work. I recommend avoiding Medium, or even tools like Squarespace. You’re a code coder. You should build your own blog. It will be a lot easier to build once you have existing content to put in it; you’ll be able to customize your blog to support your writing and your narrative style (once you know what your style is).

The easiest way to build your own blog is going to be with a static site generator. I’d recommend either Middleman (if you’re familiar with Ruby) or Gatsby (if you’re familiar with React). For hosting, use either GitHub pages or Netlify. If designing and building web UIs isn’t your strongest suit, just find a free template online and modify it to suite your needs; that’s what I did with this site’s current iteration.

And by the way, building a new site also gives you lots of new things to write about, so use it as an opportunity to practice your writing skills.

Writing well takes practice and it takes persistence, but honestly, that’s all it takes. With time and patience, you’ll become your own writing powerhouse. To sum it all up, here’s how to get proficient at technical writing on the web:

Write a lot. When you start, you need practice. Set up habits and routines to help you with this.